LOVE’S BODY AND THE BODY OF LOVE: On Norman O. Brown’s Eschatological Hermaphrodite and the Darwinian Continuities of Nature

US-American philosopher Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) was one of the very few twentieth-century intellectuals to situate hermaphroditism at the core of their work. Although Brown's publications became cult books of the then emerging protest subcultures and were eventually regarded as milestones in the history of Freudian revisionism, the reception of his views on hermaphroditism has been insubstantial. The present contribution focuses at first on Brown's attempt to supersede binary sexuality and its same-sex/other-sex combinatories by positing an ambit of hermaphroditic reconciliation that emerges from the depths of the unconscious, but is effectual only as an eschatological ideal. Against this backdrop, Brown's consequential neglect of Charles Darwin's universalization of corporeal hermaphroditism and of Magnus Hirschfeld's conception of human sexual intermediariness are analyzed and assessed.